This Is What Racism Looks Like Today

Christopher Rounds is Associate Professor of History at Allen University.

Since
the election of President Obama, much of what has been taken for
racism in politics has been conflated with the policies of the
Republican Party. From Mitt Romney's infamous comments on the 47% of
Americans who would unquestionably vote for the incumbent president
because they are "dependent upon government" to his former
running-mate Paul Ryan's remarks blaming the men of the "inner-city"
for failing to learn and appreciate "the value and the culture
of work." To liberal critics the language of Romney, Ryan, and
others was clearly code for the racial minorities who they viewed as
too lazy to work up a decent wage for themselves, those same
dependents that were the driving force behind Obama's elections.
While writer Chauncey Devega may have overstated his argument in
branding Republicans the "White Supremacy Party," the
language among the Republican leadership did call to mind the remarks
made by Republican strategist Lee Atwater regarding the so-called
"Southern Strategy" employed by the party in the early
1980s. Explaining how Republicans could win the votes of racists,
without sounding racists themselves, Atwater said:

You
start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968
you can’t say “nigger”- that hurts you, backfires. So you say
stuff like, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and
you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting
taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally
economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse
than whites... “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than
even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than
“Nigger, nigger.”

Writing
in The
Atlantic,
Ta-Nehisi Coates referred to this process, discrimination which
avoids epithets and didacticism, as "elegant racism."
"Grace is the singular marker of elegant racism," he wrote,
"One should never underestimate the touch needed to, say, injure
the voting rights of black people without ever saying their
names...Elegant racism was the poll tax. Elegant racism is voter-ID
laws." It is a racism that disguised itself in the national
discourse, to appear that it no longer existed.

Seeing
the political casualties wrought by their remarks Romney and Ryan
tried to dial back their comments, explaining that their views had
nothing to do with issues of race, but the damage was done. The
perception that the Republican Party had become the party of racism
became further entrenched. There were those within the party that saw
a very perceptible shift in the political climate. A week following
Obama's election in 2008 Charlie Crist, then the Governor of Florida,
made a speech in which he urged his party to embrace the "cultures
and lifestyles" of minority voters to produce better leaders and
a better party. Upon leaving the Republican Party after Obama's
re-election, Crist explained, "I couldn't be consistent with
myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so
unfriendly toward the African-American president." Two years
later Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia, further
took his Republican colleagues to task for pandering to racist
constituents, stating, "It’s an American characteristic that
you don’t do anything which displeases the voters...for some, it’s
just we don’t want anything good to happen under this president,
because he’s the wrong color.”

To
the President's credit- or discredit depending on the view- he has
responded to such claims with a characteristic calm detachment. In a
New
Yorker
profile of the president, Obama remarked to journalist David Remnick
that "there’s
no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because
they don’t like the idea of a black President.” But more
interesting is the President's concession that, on the other hand,
"there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who
really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because
I’m a black President." On the surface this seems somewhat in
line with Senator Michelle Bachmann's claim that there is a "cachet"
about a black president due to white guilt, and television host Bill
O'Reilly's slightly-veiled suggestion that the shortcomings of the
administration have been downplayed, or outright ignored, by the
liberal-dominated American media because "Barack Obama is
president." But what this idea has devolved into is the claim
that the supposed passes given to the Obama administration have
victimized the honest, hardworking, white Americans who are the real
victims of contemporary American racism. This dubious assertion has
been leveled multiple times by O'Reilly, fellow demagogue Glenn Beck,
and Michael Savage who, on his nationally syndicated radio show,
accused Obama of stirring up a race war.

If
the Republican leadership wished to distance themselves from such
criticism they could have done better than appoint television
personality Phil Robertson to address the 2014 Republican Leadership
Conference. Robertson, star of the "Duck Dynasty" series,
became the center of a national controversy in December of 2013 after
making deeply homophobic and racist comments in a GQ
magazine article, suggesting that "pre-entitlement, pre-welfare"
African-Americans were content in the Jim Crow south. The
Sharecroppers of Louisiana "were happy," he claimed, no one
was speaking ill of white landowners, and "no one was singing
the blues." While he became a pariah to those offended by his
words, he became a patriarch to the public and politicians aligned
along the right, an icon of free speech. This was the figure proudly
chosen to head up a conference featuring notable speakers such as
Hermain Cain, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Reince Priebus, and
Rick Santorum, among several other party luminaries.

The
elevation of Robertson, from reality star to Republican star, is the
essence of the casual racism I discussed
on HNN last week. Since the election of President Obama
popular-culture is replete with notable persons who were either found
to hold, or proudly proclaimed, their bigoted views towards racial
and sexual minorities. While these persons have faced consequences,
in terms of lost sponsors or suspended media deals, they have
simultaneously had their views defended and celebrated as patriotic
dissent against an American society overrun with racial sensitivities
and political correctness. Just a half year before Robertson's
sanctification, after all, our national discourse circulated just as
ferociously around the remarks of Paula Deen.

The
controversy began when a former-employee filed suit in 2013 alleging
that as manager of one of Deen's restaurants in Savannah she
experienced sexual and racial harassment, including Deen's use of
derogatory racial remarks. When asked, during a deposition, if she
had ever used the word "Nigger," Deen recalled having only
done so after being held-up, at gunpoint, by a black male in 1987.
While not excusing the slur, the conditions under which Deen used it
was a mitigating factor in the court of public opinion. In
a Today show
interview with Matt Lauer, Deen further insisted that she is not a
racist, believing that "all of God’s creatures should be
treated equally." Nevertheless, the blowback was immediate and
severe. Deen lost endorsement deals and partnerships with Walmart,
Target, Sears, Home Depot, J.C. Penney and several other
corporations.

Certainly
Robertson and Deen had their supporters, and they were regularly
defended not as racists, but southerners who were raised in a
different time, a time when such words and thoughts were used often
and unapologetically, when white people could freely speak their mind
without fear of rebuke. Blogger Dustin Rowles speculates that Deen-
and doubtlessly many of her fans- are racists that honestly don't
believe they are racist. Like Deen, Rowles was born in the South and
openly admits that both of his parents and many of his teachers were
racists who cursed Abraham Lincoln and referred to his black
classmates as Niggers:

It
took me a lot of years to understand that the N-word was charged,
that there was subtext and history to that word, and it's no wonder.
Where were we going to learn otherwise? Teachers, who ignored its
usage? Parents, who had passed the word and the culture of racism
onto their children?

"These
were the people that raised me," Rowles laments, "that
raised people like Paula Deen." Eventually, Rowles left the
South and voluntarily cut ties with his family to ensure that his
young children are not exposed to the culture of racism that marked
his own youth.

Towards
that end there is the theory that once retrograde racists such as
Robertson and Deen, pass away their racists beliefs and attitudes
will pass along with them, and that with time a post-racial utopia
awaits. But, Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper fears that
"we will not find a cosmopolitan racial future awaiting us;
rather [people of color] will be led to the slaughter by the likes of
Paul Ryan." And as Coates has written, Americans must not
get caught up with the comments of reality stars, celebrity chefs,
and our most recent Public Enemy #1- Donald Sterling- but remain
cognizant of the elegant racism peddled by Ryan and his cohorts. This
is because men like Sterling confirm our comfortable view of racists.
"Sterling is a 'bad person,'" Coates wrote, "He's mean
to women. He carouses with prostitutes.He
uses the word 'nigger.' He fits our idea of what an actual racist
must look like: snarling, villainous, immoral, ignorant...But a
racism, condemnable by all civilized people, must make itself
manifest now and again so that we may celebrate how far we have
come." Meanwhile racism, elegantly designed, casually accepted,
monstrously effective, carries on.